'Thy neck is an iron sinew.' - Jehovah to the house of Jacob.
all ages of a poor sinner's Bible. But you can spare that head. You can
preach on that text to yourselves far better than all your ministers.
Only, take home with you these two lines I have clipped out of Fraser
of Brea for you. Nothing in man, he says to us, is to be a ground of
despair, since the whole ground of all our hope is in Christ alone.
Christ's relation is always to men as they are sinners and not as they
are righteous. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to
repentance. 'Tis with sinners, then, Christ has to do. Nothing damns
but unbelief; and unbelief is just holding back from pressing God with
this promise, that Christ came to save sinners. This is a faithful saying,
and worthy of all acceptation, and it is still to be found standing in the most clipped-up Bible, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save
sinners; of whom I am chief.
Chapter 11 - STIFF MR. LOTH-TO-STOOP
'Thy neck is an iron sinew.' - Jehovah to the house of Jacob.
'King Zedekiah humbled not himself, but stiffened his neck.' - The
Chronicles.
'He humbled himself.' - Paul on our Lord.
All John Bunyan's Characters, Situations, and Episodes are
collected into this house to-night. Obstinate and Pliable are here;
Passion and Patience; Simple, Sloth, and Presumption; Madame
Bubble and Mr. Worldly-wiseman; Talkative and By-ends; Deaf Mr.
Prejudice is here also, and, sitting close beside him, stiff Mr. Loth-to-
stoop; while good old Mr. Wet-eyes and young Captain Self-denial are
not wholly wanting. It gives this house an immense and an ever-green
interest to me to see character after character coming trooping in,
Sabbath evening after Sabbath evening, each man to see himself and
his neighbour in John Bunyan's so truthful and so fearless glass. But it
stabs me to the heart with a mortal stab to see how few of us out of
this weekly congregation are any better men after all we come to see
and to hear. At the same time, such a constant dropping will surely in
time wear away the hardest rock. Let that so stiff old man, then, stiff
old Mr. Loth-to-stoop, came forward and behold his natural face in
John Bunyan's glass again to-night. 'Lord, is it I?' was a very good
question, though put by a very bad man. Let us, one and all, then, put
the traitor's question to ourselves to-night. Am I stiff old Loth-to-
stoop? - let every man in this house say to himself all through this
service, and then at home when reviewing the day, and then all to-
morrow when to stoop will be so loathsome and so impossible to us
all.
To begin, then, at the very bottom of this whole matter, take stiff
old Loth-to-stoop as a guilty sinner in the sight of God. Let us take this
stiff old man in this dreadful character to begin with, because it is in
this deepest and most dreadful aspect of his nature and his character
that he is introduced to us in the Holy War. And I shall stand aside and
let John Bunyan himself describe Loth-to-stoop in the matter of his
justification before God. 'That is a great stoop for a sinner to have to
take,' says our apostolic author in another classical place, 'a too great
stoop to have to suffer the total loss of all his own righteousness, and,
actually, to have to look to another for absolutely everything of that
kind. That is no easy matter for any man to do. I assure you it
stretches every vein in his heart before he will be brought to yield to
that. What! for a man to deny, reject, abhor, and throw away all his
prayers, tears, alms, keeping of Sabbaths, hearing, reading, and all the
rest, and to admit both himself and them to be abominable and
accursed, and to be willing in the very midst of his sins to throw
himself wholly upon the righteousness and obedience of another man!
I say to do that in deed and in truth is the biggest piece of the cross,
and therefore it is that Paul calls it a suffering. "I have suffered the loss of all things that I might win Christ, and be found in Him, not having
mine own righteousness."' That is John Bunyan's characteristic
comment on stiff old Loth-to-stoop as a guilty sinner, with the offer of
a full forgiveness set before him.
And then our so truthful and so fertile author goes on to give us
Loth-to-stoop as a half-saved sinner; a sinner, that is, trying to make
his own terms with God about his full salvation. Through three most
powerful pages we see stiff old Loth-to-stoop engaged in beating
down God's unalterable terms of salvation, and in bidding for his full
salvation upon his own reduced and easy terms. It was the
tremendous stoop of the Son of God from the throne of God to the
cradle and the carpenter's shop; and then, as if that were not enough,
it was that other tremendous stoop of His down to the Garden and the
Cross, - it was these two so tremendous stoops of Jesus Christ that
made stiff old Loth-to-stoop's salvation even possible. But, with all
that, his true salvation was not possible without stoop after stoop of
his own; stoop after stoop which, if not so tremendous as those of
Christ, were yet tremendous enough, and too tremendous, for him. Old
Loth-to-stoop carries on a long and a bold debate with Emmanuel in
order to lessen the stoop that Emmanuel demands of him; and your
own life and mine, my brethren, at their deepest and at their closest to
our own heart, are really at bottom, like Loth-to-stoop's life, one long
roup of salvation, in which God tries to get us up to His terms and in
which we try to get Him down to our terms. His terms are, that we
shall sell absolutely all that we have for the salvation of our souls; and
our terms are, salvation or no salvation, to keep all that we have and to
seek every day for more. God absolutely demands that we shall stoop
to the very dust every day, till we become the poorest, the meanest,
the most despicable, and the most hopeless of men; whereas we meet that divine demand with the proud reply - Is Thy servant a dog? It was
with this offended mind that stiff old Loth-to-stoop at last left off from
Emmanuel's presence; he would die rather than come down to such
degrading terms. And as Loth-to-stoop went away, Emmanuel looked
after him, well remembering the terrible night when He Himself was,
not indeed like Loth-to-stoop, nor near like him, but when His own
last stoop was so deep that it made Him cry out, Father, save Me from
this hour! and again, If it be possible let this so tremendous stoop pass
from Me. For a moment Emmanuel Himself was loth to stoop, but only
for a moment. For He soon rose from off His face in a bath of blood,
saying, Not My will, but Thine be done! When Thomas A Kempis is
negotiating with the Loth-to-stoops of his unevangelical day, we hear
him saying to them things like this: 'Jesus Christ was despised of men,
forsaken of His friends and lovers, and in the midst of slanders. He
was willing, under His Father's will, to suffer and to be despised, and
darest thou to complain of any man's usage of thee? Christ, thy Master,
had enemies and back-biters, and dost thou expect to have all men to
be thy friends and benefactors? Whence shall thy patience attain her
promised crown if no adversity befall thee? Suffer thou with Jesus
Christ, and for His sake, if thou wouldst reign with Him. Set thyself,
therefore, to bear manfully the cross of thy Lord, who, out of love, was
crucified for thee. Know for certain that thou must lead a daily dying
life. And the more that thou diest to thyself all that the more shalt thou
live unto God.' With many such words as these did Thomas teach the
saints of his day to stoop to their daily cross; a daily cross then, which
has now been for long to him and to them an everlasting crown.
And speaking of A Kempis, and having lately read some of his
most apposite chapters, such as that on the Holy Fathers and that on
Obedience and Subjection, leads me on to look at Loth-to-stoop when
he enters the sacred ministry, as he sometimes does. When a half-
converted, half-subdued, half-saved sinner gets himself called to the
sacred ministry his office will either greatly hasten on his salvation, or
else it will greatly hinder and endanger it. He will either stoop down
every day to deeper and ever deeper depths of humility, or he will
tower up in pride of office and in pride of heart past all hope of
humility, and thus of salvation. The holy ministry is a great nursing-
house of pride as we see in a long line of popes, and prelates, and priests, and other lords over God's heritage. And our own
Presbyterian polity, while it hands down to us the simplicity, the unity,
the brotherhood, and the humility of the apostolic age, at the same
time leaves plenty of temptation and plenty of opportunity for the
pride of the human heart. Our preaching and pastoral office, when it is
aright laid to our hearts, will always make us the meekest and the
humblest of men, even when we carry the most magnificent of
messages. But when our own hearts are not right the very
magnificence of our message, and the very authority of our Master,
become all so many subtle temptations to pride, pique, self-
importance, and lothness-to-stoop. With so much still to learn, how
slow we ministers are to stoop to learn! How still we stand, and even
go back, when all other men are going forward! How few of us have
made the noble resolution of Jonathan Edwards: 'Resolved,' he wrote,
'that, as old men have seldom any advantage of new discoveries
because these are beside a way of thinking they have been long used
to: resolved, therefore, if ever I live to years, that I shall be impartial to
hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and to receive them, if
rational how long soever I have been used to another way of thinking.'
Let all ministers, then, young and old, resolve to stoop with Jonathan
Edwards, who shines, in his life and in his works, like the cherubim
with knowledge, and burns like the seraphim with love.
And then, when, not having so resolved, our thin vein of youthful
knowledge and experience has been worked to the rock; when grey
hairs are here and there upon us, how slow we are to stoop to that!
How unwilling we are to let it light on our hearts that our time is past;
that we are no longer able to understand, or interest, or attract the
young; and, besides, that that is not all their blame, no, nor ours either,
but simply the order and method of Divine Providence. How slow we
are to see that Divine Providence has other men standing ready to
take up our work if we would only humbly lay it down; - how loth we
are to stoop to see all that! How unwilling we are to make up our
minds, we old and ageing ministers, and to humble our hearts to
accept an assistant or to submit to a colleague to stand alongside of us
in our unaccomplished work!
In public life also, as we call it, what disasters to the state, to the
services, and to society, are constantly caused by this same Loth-to-stoop! When he holds any public office; when he becomes the leader
of a party; when he is promoted to be an adviser of the Crown; when
he is put at the head of a fleet of ships, or of an army of men, what
untold evils does Loth-to-stoop bring both on himself and on the
nation! An old statesman will have committed himself to some line of
legislation or of administration; a great captain will have committed
himself to some manoeuvre of a squadron or of a division, or to some
plan of battle, and some subordinate will have discovered the error
his leader has made, and will be bold to point it out to him. But stiff
old Loth-to-stoop has taken his line and has passed his word. His
honour, as he holds it, is committed to this announced line of action;
and, if the Crown itself should perish before his policy, he will not
stoop to change it. How often you see that in great affairs as well as in